Lately, Mary and I have had lots of fun making extra special desserts for birthdays, celebrations, and more! We are always excited to receive custom orders from friends and family, so when we were asked to make three desserts for this weekend, we couldn't wait to whip up some fabulous treats to help make these occasions even sweeter.
For our first order, we were asked to make cupcakes for a fairy themed birthday party for one of our favorite seven year old's! We decided to make butterfly wings out of Wilton candy melts and use them to decorate the cupcakes. To do this, we melted the colored chocolate discs, placed the chocolate into a piping bag, and piped the design onto a piece of parchment paper. In order to ensure a consistent shape, we traced a wing template on a sheet of paper underneath the parchment. After piping the wings, we placed them right into the freezer to harden the chocolate before placing them onto the cupcakes. Although piping the wing designs was a tedious task, the hardest part turned out to be transferring the wings from the parchment onto the cupcakes without the wings breaking! Many butterfly wings were cracked in the process, but by the end we perfected our technique and ended up with beautiful butterfly cupcakes!
Our second order was for a late Father's Day cake for one of our great family friends. We knew the dad really loves chocolate and is an avid golfer, so wanted to combine two of his favorite things in a unique and delicious cake. We used a classic two-layer chocolate cake recipe from Ina Garten in Food and Wine Magazine and frosted the top with our favorite vanilla icing recipe (the recipe is in this post!). The "grass" on the top of the cake is piped on with a grass/hair piping tip, which has a few tiny holes giving a perfect grass look! We topped the cake off with a graham cracker crumb sand trap, a flag, and a tee. This cake was really a hole in one, as the dad's reaction was priceless and the family really enjoyed the cake!
Lastly, we were asked to make baseball themed cupcakes for a little league Phillies end of the season party. They asked us to incorporate the Phillies logo, so we used the Wilton melt technique a second time to make the P's! We were a bit more experienced this time after making the butterfly wings, and the P's were definitely not as fragile as the butterfly wings. We wanted to make a variety of cupcakes, so decided to go with a baseball cupcake with laces piped on using red colored vanilla icing, and ball and bat cupcakes with green "grass" icing. We made the bats out of molded tootsie rolls and the little balls out of white ball-shaped chocolate candies! We used the same grass tip for these cupcakes as we used for the golf cake.
We've had lots of requests for the vanilla frosting recipe we always use, so here it is!
Our Famous Vanilla Buttercream Frosting
Ingredients
- 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
- 3 1/2 cups confectioners sugar
- 1 teaspoon milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- In a bowl, combine butter, sugar and salt until blended.
- Add milk and vanilla and beat an additional 3-5 minutes or until smooth and creamy.
If you are ever looking for anyone to recreate that Pinterest recipe you've been dreaming of or just want some extra special treats for your special occasion, let us know! We LOVE baking fun sweets for people.
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